Peeling Back the Curtain: Exploring the Brand Backstory

Abstract

Compelling brand experiences offer narratives that are carefully crafted to captivate consumers. One such compelling experience, the brand backstory, offers consumers the opportunity to experience the behind-the-scenes or making of a brand. Characterized by the offering of esoteric brand knowledge that is revealed and unveiled to consumers, the brand backstory is captivating in dually offering a deconstruction of the brand whilst also aiming to manifest a sense of truthful transparency to consumers. However, this paradox inherent to the brand backstory construct has received limited attention within marketing research. As such, there is ample motivation for marketers and researchers alike to study and understand the brand backstory and the role of its narrative of revealing and unveiling esoteric brand knowledge to consumers. The introductory chapter provides a conceptual overview of the brand backstory and the domain in which this thesis is situated. Given that prior research has not examined this increasingly popular marketing practice, this introduction explains how the thesis contributes by presenting three separate and distinct papers that together, provide a holistic understanding of the brand backstory. The three papers focus on exploring the brand backstory from a variety of lenses and provide a pluralistic conceptualization of the construct, demonstrating the negotiations through which the brand narrative is conceived, constructed and received. Specifically each paper centers on the brand backstory: (1) conceptually as a construct in consumer culture, (2) as crafted by brand practitioners and (3) as experienced by consumers. Each paper is a self-contained project with its own theoretical development and contribution to the marketing literature, yet each contributes to an overall theoretical understanding of the dynamism of a novel and underexplored branding construct to ultimately illuminate a holistic understanding of institutional theory at play.